Tom Warren: "While Intel is trying to keep the Windows tree healthy, Microsoft is hoping that the leaves don't start to drop off before its own family of Surface devices are fully ready. Redmond isn't 'priming the pump' here, it's planting seeds for the future. If Microsoft is successful then it could be the world's biggest Windows OEM in just a few years. The future is Surface." You just have to look at the difference in build quality and supplied software between OEM devices and Surface even though Surface is cheaper to realise that the age of Windows OEMs is coming to an end. The writing's on the wall, and the OEMs know it: there's no future for them in Windows.

I would just nuke whatever "Linux" they preload and install whatever distribution I want anyway, so the fact that I wouldn't be paying a Windows tax upfront would be a good enough advantage for me. That's the whole point of a "general purpose" computer after all, isn't it? That it can be programmed and configured to work as you see fit?

The normal "joe" and "jane" users are not like you, so they just use what is already there. This was one of the reasons these dummbed down Linuxes sold so bad. Even their own repositories were almost empty.

As for installing your favorite Linux distribution, good luck in some of those systems. If the netbook is not a famous one, not even the usual guys care about reverse engineering some of their parts.

And choice is not bad... do you really get pissed when you walk down the cereal aisle in your local supermarket and see countless brands and types of cereal to choose from, often imitations of each other with seemingly nothing different other than the price tag? Do you really wish every car at a car dealership was just a black Model T so you didn't have to worry about pesky differences like comfort, features, power, and fuel efficiency? Would we really be better off if the only beers in the world were the "Light" flavorless variants of Bud, Miller and Coors, with all those traditional styles and delicious craft beers forced off the shelves and their brewers forced out of business?

Choice is good, but when it is too much it has the reserve effect.

Psychology studies confirm that the stress of a given individual increases as the amount of choices is available to him/her in a given moment.

The choice some people always like to brag about in Linux distributions already happened once, the survivors like myself know it as UNIX wars. It almost killed portability across UNIX systems.